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Clouds over climate study

Survey researcher and academic John Krosnick recently wrote an article for the New York Times called The Climate Majority, in which he describes a poll he conducted on community attitudes to climate change.
Contrary to other polls, he found massive support for climate mitigation policies in the US, even if other countries don’t follow suit.
Now, let’s ignore the fact that the umbrella institution for this study is the Woods Institute for the Environment, which, judging by their website, already has a position on global warming and whether we should take action. Let’s just pass right by that one, and assume the poll was done in good faith.

Here’s question 12:

You may have heard about the idea that the world’s temperature may have been going up slowly over the past 100 years. What is your personal opinion on this – do you think this has probably been happening, or do you think it probably has not been happening?

So far, so good. They got about one quarter of respondents saying that it had not been happening. That’s pretty hard core skepticism, since most skeptics in the sciences agree it’s at least happening. But anyway, then comes Question 14.

(Assuming it’s happening) Do you think a rise in the world’s temperature is being (would be) caused mostly by things people do, mostly by natural causes, or about equally by things people do and by natural causes?

The way this question works is if you don’t believe in warming, you get the words in brackets. In other words, if you said, nope the planet is not warming at all, then they would ask you “assume it is happening,…”
Okay. does anybody else see the problem with this?
Allow me to use an example to illustrate. Let’s say we’re doing a survey on whether the world was created in 7 days, as described in Genesis.
Surveyer: “Do you believe the world was created in seven days by God, as described in the book of Genesis?”
Me: “No.”
Surveyer: “Assuming it was, do you think that God intended for Adam to bite the apple, or did not intend for Adam to bite the apple?”
Me: “WTF? I don’t want to answer your stupid questions any more.”

Come on. “Assuming it was?” they might as well have said, “we’re greenies, just humor us for the rest of the survey please.”
After being invited to play along, it’s not clear that respondents would know when to stop.
As it turned out, they got
“Things people do” 30 %
“Natural causes” 25 %
“Both equally” 45 %
In my experience – you can consider this to be “qualitative evidence” if you like – when people say “both equally” they’re really expressing skepticism, but are either being polite, or are too unsure of their knowledge of the issue to come out with a strong stance. It’s a token gesture toward the scientists, so as to not hurt their feelings. They’re hedging their bets.
If those numbers split evenly down that 75/25 split from question 12, that leaves about 22 percent of the population are hard-core global warming believers. Hardly a huge majority.
But really, by this time, the jig is up. The survey is clearly about global warming and whether people care enough to do anything about it. There’s a slight problem with this and that is that Global Warming is touted as a moral issue. Some have described it as “the greatest moral issue of our time.”
Here’s the irony.
Krosnick himself is an expert on biases in surveys, and has published papers that show that when one particular stance is socially desirable (like being good, or being green, or caring about planet Earth, perhaps) people are likely to put on a good face even to an anonymous telephone surveyor.
Global warming seems like a prime candidate for such a social desirability bias. In which case, his survey possibly over-estimates the level of support for global warming mitigation policies. Maybe it’s a lot less than 22 percent.

2010 06 22 "daddy" Dave Uncategorized Comments Off Permalink

16 policy ideas for Tony Abbott

The past couple of weeks have seen some shockingly bad ideas come out of the Federal Coalition. First there was the paid parental leave scheme; now there’s this soup of a policy, employee ownership. Marxism for the 21st century! Workers and bosses can all hold hands and chant “Workers united will never be defeated.”

Did these people sort of get put into the Liberal Party on some kind of work release program, and were told to invent a policy a day? Are they playing a bizarre game of “spin-the-policy” wheel?

I’ve decided to help. Here are sixteen policies that Abbott should adopt.

1. Repeal repeal repeal.
This one is easy. Half their platform should be rollbacks of bad ideas.
The mining tax, obviously. But also the “Building Education Revolution” and any other residual vestiges of the stimulus package.

2.Nix the NBN
This monstrous white elephant will cost $2000 for every man, woman and child in Australia, and $5000 for every house. Most people, if you said “would you like the government to spend 5000 dollars putting fast internet to your home?” would reply, “no thanks, my internet is fine already.”
45 billion (or whatever it is) right there.

3. kill the filter.
Conroy’s internet filter is not only impractical, it has made us an international laughing stock in the IT world (just as the RSPT did in the resources industry). It smacks of moralism and is a worrisome slide toward state control of information and overbearing socialism. Kill it.

4. Restore relations with India.
Rudd has royally screwed things up with India. It’s time to mend the friendship. India are a natural ally. They’re an English-speaking capitalist democracy, just like us, they have a problem with terrorism, and they play cricket. Mending things may mean, among other things, selling them uranium, but Abbott need not promise that right now. he can promise a visit to India as a priority though.

5. Free Stern Hu.
Rudd threw Hu to the wolves. Abbott should express outrage at the treatment of this Australian citizen and demand his return.

6.Let universities charge for undergraduate positions.
Currently only overseas students can buy their way into courses. Locals used to be able to do it but Rudd stopped them. That move was naked class warfare. it doesn’t benefit local students. Paying students were not “taking places away.” they were buying extra places, that simply disappeared.

7. abolish tenure.
Right now, Australian academics jobs start as tenure. this means that someone walks into a new job with a guarantee for life. Talk about a union cartel! Get rid of it.

8. Deregulate land use
Maybe there will be a property bust, maybe not. Either way, deregulation of land use will play well. If there’s no bust, then clearly moribund laws are keeping Australian prices high. If there is a bust, then the laws are creating a boom-bust cycle.
of course we all like our towns to be pretty as a picture; but there’s a price for that. Excessive regulation keeps land price high; makes small player entry difficult (hence the rise and rise of Westfield, for example); restricts the number and variety of commercial operations; and homogenises our towns.
But what about urban sprawl? That’s just a polite way of describing the horror of working class people living in nice homes. According to the planning elite, they should live in apartments and narrow terraces in ‘vibrant’ city centres.

9. Expand the Active After School Care program.
The Australian Sports Commission runs a very successful program where kids play sport after school. right now it’s not available to all kids in all schools.

10. Fund grass roots sporting participation
such as clubs, rather than elite sport. My hunch is that the Australian obsession with Olympic medal counts is over-estimated by vested interests. It certainly smacks of elitism, and personal indulgence at public expense.

11. Make the Northern Territory a free trade zone.
This is an idea of economist Terje Peterson who comments at catallaxyfiles.com; it makes sense on all kinds of levels.

12. Build a National freeway system.
We could take inspiration from the american interstate system. Okay, we can’t have a latticework of freeways covering the entire continent, but we can have some things; dual carriageway between Sydney and Brisbane for instance, or even take it all the way to Cairns.
To keep the Westralians happy, we could build a bit of freeway up the WA coast as well, maybe Perth to Broome.

13. Take the first steps toward nuclear power.
Labor ran ads against Howard on this very issue in 2007, but public sentiment is drifting the other way. Abbott seems to not be afraid to resurrect supposedly dead policy ideas (like ditching the ETS), and this is another one he could capitalise on.
A little known fact… Australia’s coal powered stations are ageing; many are operating past their official use by dates, the life spans that they were predicted to have when they were built.

14. Abolish the department of climate change ( I think they’re going to do this one anyway)

15. End Film Subsidies.
Promise to stop subsidising rubbishy Australian films. Locally made movies are a disgrace.

16. Sell SBS
Do we really need two public broacasters?

Don’t thank me, Tony.
But if I’m watching the news and I see you make the following announcement:
“The coalition will build a freeway system connecting nuclear power systems with a running track for school kids, paid for from the profits of selling SBS, canning film subsidies and abolishing the Department of Climate Change”
Then you can expect an invoice to my paypal account.
And please, no more renditions of “Workers united”.

(update: really should have mentioned deregulating child care somewhere. It’s hideously expensive and hidebound with needless regulation, in the name of giving all kids the best possible care. Hey, if you want something to be ‘beyond market forces’, then fine but the state should pay. If it’s user pays, let us choose what kind of care we want our kids in.)

2010 06 19 "daddy" Dave Uncategorized Comments Off Permalink

The new conspiracy theory

Two months ago, before climategate, nobody ever talked about a climate “conspiracy theory”. People who didn’t believe in man-made climate change were not accused of being conspiracy theorists, they were simply ‘deniers’, denialists, contrarians and naysayers.
Now, thanks to climategate, we learn that there was a conspiracy to thwart Freedom of Information requests, manipulate data, and subvert the peer review process.
All of a sudden, after we learn that there’s a verifiable conspiracy that most of us (certainly I) did not even suspect, climate skeptics are being labeled conspiracy theorists.
What rank dishonesty.
If you get busted for corruption, the best course of action, it seems, is to declare your accusers of being conspiracy theorists.

2009 12 21 admin Uncategorized Comments Off Permalink

Eight responses to seven answers

Jason Soon asked for feedback and opinions on the Scientific Article, Seven Answers to Climate Contrarian Nonsense.

Jason, since you asked, here’s my take on that article. I think it’s weak in many places, but particularly weak when it gets to climategate.

The Scientific American (SciAm) article by John Rennie looks at seven claims of so-called contrarians about climate change, goes through each one, and explains it away. These seven claims, Rennie believes, are nonsense. But are they? It’s a bit of a straw man hunt, but someone packed those straw men with bricks. Rennie should watch his toes.

Claim 1: “CO2 is only a trace gas in the atmosphere and the amount produced by humans is dwarfed by the amount from volcanoes and other natural sources.”

Rennie’s point is that this does not refute the AGW hypothesis, and he’s right, it doesn’t. It was never supposed to. But What it does is raise a face-value plausibility hurdle for the AGW hypothesis. It’s a move in the chess game, not the checkmate.

Claim 2: The alleged “hockey stick” graph of temperatures over the past 1,600 years has been disproved.

This is hardly “contrarian nonsense.” The hockey stick has been disproved. It’s what made the climateaudit.org blog famous (and indeed the climategate emails show how much they loath and fear McIntyre to this day). The SciAm defense seems to be to diffuse the hockey stick across many papers and models, rendering it safe from attack, which is no defense at all.

SciAm raises the question “what if the hockey stick was false” and concludes that the theory would still stand. Okay. But the hockey stick featured in IPCC reporting AND in Al Gore’s movie. So it’s something. There was a time when it was considered an important piece of evidence. So if it’s disproved, that may not be a knockout, but it’s not nothing.

Claim 3: Global warming stopped a decade ago; Earth has been cooling since then.

Again, this is factually true. SciAm’s point is that the long-term trend is still there; and certainly if you look at the past 100 years, the overall trend is up. However, the models 10 years ago were predicting further rises in the decade just gone that did not eventuate. They predicted warming when cooling occurred. Once upon a time, that would have been called “disconfirming evidence.” These days you just tweak the model post-hoc and keep going.
However climate scientists are privately troubled by the fact that their theories were falsified (as any scientist should be!). The climategate emails include admissions that they fretted about the fact that this was devastating evidence against AGW.

Claim 4: The sun or cosmic rays are much more likely to be the real causes of global warming. After all, Mars is warming up, too.

Unimportant either way. It’s an alternative hypothesis with a similar amount of empirical support, which is to say, not much at all.

Claim 5: Climatologists conspire to hide the truth about global warming by locking away their data. Their so-called “consensus” on global warming is scientifically irrelevant because science isn’t settled by popularity.

Here, the Scientific American article is flat-out wrong. Rennie says (I imagined, with a chuckle)

“If there were a massive conspiracy to defraud the world on climate (and to what end?), surely the thousands of e-mails and other files stolen from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit and distributed by hackers on November 20 would bear proof of it. So far, however, none has emerged.”

I have to call a big B.S. on that. There is proof, in the climategate emails for anyone to see, that climate researchers thwarted FOI requests for their data and that they stacked and subverted the peer review process.
That’s a conspiracy.
And it’s not a conspiracy “theory” any more than watergate is a conspiracy “theory.” It’s verifiable fact.

Claim 6: Climatologists have a vested interest in raising the alarm because it brings them money and prestige.

I have no opinion or comment on this one.

Claim 7: Technological fixes, such as inventing energy sources that don’t produce CO2 or geoengineering the climate, would be more affordable, prudent ways to address climate change than reducing our carbon footprint.

This is about the economics. Does it cost more to act now, or to adapt? It’s not “contrarian nonsense” to argue for delayed costs, especially in the face of multiple uncertainties.

That’s the seven claims, but the article doesn’t mention the most powerful skeptical claim of all… let’s call it claim 8.

Claim 8. There is no hard evidence that CO2 causes temperature rises.
The best we have is a modest correlational evidence, and as any graduate student will tell you, correlation does not equal causation. Even the IPCC says there’s only a 90 percent chance that AGW theory is correct.
The fact that that is an acceptable thing for scientists to say with a straight face just blows my mind. Gauss, Popper and others are rolling in their graves.

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2009 12 21 admin Uncategorized Comments Off Permalink

Break time!

I have lots of real life things to do, which include earning money, childraising, other family stuff, and a book I’m working on.
I will return, at some as-yet-undetermined point in the future.

2009 10 02 "daddy" Dave Uncategorized Comments Off Permalink

maybe it’s good she’s retiring after all

Lily Allen is contributing to a remake of Midnight Oil’s Beds are Burning to get the message of climate change across for the Copenhagen talks.
Guys, that’s not art, that’s propaganda set to music.

2009 10 01 "daddy" Dave Uncategorized Comments Off Permalink

The global warming debate is over (at last)

In the past two weeks there have been some remarkable developments in the climate change debate. First, a key dataset used to prove the case for global warming has disappeared and those involved aren’t talking about it. See this article for more: The dog ate global warming, although it’s all over the blogosphere.
Then Steve Macintyre of Climateaudit managed to get his hands on a hitherto secret database that had been used to construct the Manne hockey stick- that graph that Gore shows you in An Inconvenient Truth that shows global temperatures spiking in the 20th century. It turns out that the data was cherry picked. When a more complete dataset is used, there is no spike.
And of course earlier this year was Ian Plimer’s epic book on the topic, Heaven and Earth.
Anyone who still believes in climate change is behind the times.

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2009 09 30 "daddy" Dave Uncategorized Comments (1) Permalink

The limits of willpower

Apparently there’s a limit to willpower. Force yourself to do enough things that you don’t find easy or enjoyable, and you run out of willpower to keep making yourself do new things.
http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/006569.html
This is why it’s a good idea to make changes to your life one at a time. Routine is the solution here. Once something becomes routine, you no longer need willpower.

2009 09 30 "daddy" Dave Uncategorized Comments Off Permalink

things that rhyme with orange

It is often said that nothing rhymes with orange. I guess it depends on what you count as a rhyme, and it depends on how you say “orange” and how you say the rhyming word, but take your pick from this list.

strange
mange
flange
melange
hinge
binge

2009 09 29 "daddy" Dave Uncategorized Comments (1) Permalink